The South’s Man in London

In late 1861, a 27-year-old naturalized Alabamian from Switzerland named Henry Hotze was sent on a secret mission to London. Officially, he would be a Confederate commercial agent, negotiating trade deals between Britain and the South. But his real task, given to him by the Confederate secretary of state, Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, was much more sensitive: to persuade the British people to support the Confederate cause.

Hotze’s mission represented a departure in Confederate foreign policy. When the war began in April 1861, Confederate officials had hoped that the economic power of cotton alone would force the British government to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf. For much of the 19th century, Britain had carried on a booming trade with the American South; Southern plantations supplied cotton fiber to the bustling textile mills of Birmingham and Manchester, and, in return, Southern planters furnished their homes with British goods and filled their libraries with British books. Few Confederate patriots could have imagined that Britain could long tolerate any disruption to this lucrative commerce.

To speed British action, early in the war the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, ordered growers and shippers to withhold cotton from the world market. He imagined that his embargo would wreak financial havoc, causing factories to close and throwing thousands of laborers out of work — and that, to save the world financial system from collapse, the British government would have no choice but to help arrange a cease-fire, or, better yet, join the war against the Union. Davis’s stratagem became known as “King Cotton Diplomacy.”

Lonnie A. BurnettHenry Hotze

It was a miserable failure. London was less reliant on Southern cotton than Davis had assumed. A Union naval blockade began to gradually choke off Southern ports, making the very premise of King Cotton diplomacy moot. The Royal Navy had not taken to the seas to ensure the flow of cotton, nor had officials in London committed troops to the cause of Southern independence. The British government had not yet even agreed to officially recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. It was Henry Hotze’s job to figure out what had gone wrong.

Hotze arrived in London in early 1862. What he found worried him. The lack of Southern cotton had not troubled the English people nearly as much as the Confederate leadership had assumed it would. A mild winter had allowed British workingmen and -women to make ends meet, even while working fewer hours. Some speculators, cotton wholesalers and merchants had actually profited by the cotton shortage as prices rose and importers shifted to growers in India and Egypt to meet demand. In general, Hotze found most Englishmen “cold and indifferent” toward what he called the Confederacy’s “great war for a nation’s life.”

Though the picture looked bleak at the moment, Hotze didn’t give up all hope. British public opinion might seem apathetic, but he also found it “in a fusible state.” He concluded that Southern officials had put too much faith in economic self-interest and had not spent enough time appealing to the hearts and minds of the British people. Determined to seize the opportunity, he proposed to carry out a propaganda campaign on behalf of the Confederacy.

To many white Southerners, Henry Hotze appeared to be the perfect person to represent their cause abroad. In the years before the war, the young European-born American had earned a growing reputation as an academic celebrity in the South. After immigrating to the United States, he took up a career in journalism and quickly embraced Southern causes. During the 1850s, he explained that, as a native of the Swiss republic, he cherished the principles of local self-government. “States rights and federal powers,” he declared, had been frequently “discussed over his cradle.”

White Southerners found his views on slavery especially acceptable. As a student in Switzerland, Hotze had developed a keen interest in history, anthropology and the study of race, and he came to the United States convinced that racial characteristics played a key role in determining a person’s character, capabilities and intellect. He first became widely known in the South when he translated into English the work of the French count Arthur de Gobineau, who had argued that mankind was divided into three different and inherently unequal races, the white, the black and the yellow. Hotze left his reading of Gobineau a believer in the superiority of the white race and a defender of slavery.

In England, Hotze came determined to employ his views in defense of the Confederacy. He believed that if Englishmen only understood the principles undergirding the struggle of the South, then they would enthusiastically embrace the Southern cause. In early 1862, he published several editorials in British newspapers arguing for recognition of the Confederacy, but in the weeks after they appeared he began to work on a much more ambitious undertaking. In May, he began publishing his own weekly newspaper, which he named the Index.

Under Hotze’s direction, the Index became the leading expositor of the Confederate cause in Europe, and one of the most important anywhere. Though the front page always printed information on cotton markets to call attention to English economic interests, the real substance of the paper came in its editorial columns. Hotze recruited writers from Europe and America who shared his intellectual commitments. He chose one of his English writers for his “devotion to the cause of national independence,” and he worked hard to recruit famous Southern intellectuals, including the University of Virginia professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe and John Rueben Thompson, former editor of the Southern Literary Messenger.

Together, Hotze and his writers outlined the intellectual substance of the Confederate cause. First and foremost, they seized on the right of national self-determination. They proclaimed that 19th-century people lived in an “age of liberal thought,” in which no serious thinker could deny the right of any people to establish their own government if they wished. The American Revolution of the 1770s and the French Revolution of 1789 had made that quite clear to the world, and the Confederate revolution should benefit from the precedents they had set. The South, one editorial maintained, fought for rights “which have never been disputed to any people in modern times.”

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The editorials in Hotze’s paper worked hard to depict Confederates as heroic patriots fighting for home rule, and they pleaded with Englishmen to recognize the fact. Southerners, one article reasoned, desired only “that self-government which Englishmen practice themselves and usually commend in others.” Hotze and his contributors wholeheartedly believed that Southerners had already established a nation, and it only awaited British action to secure its well-deserved independence. “We have just witnessed in the New World,” one article declared, “the sublime spectacle of the birth and fiery baptism of a nation.”

While these articles appealed to the liberal sentiments of the British people, ultimately Hotze and his collaborators refused to apologize that this new nation was founded on a defense of slavery. In fact, they argued that slavery would give the Confederate nation peculiar unity and strength. Slavery, the argument went, would endow the South with the “intrinsic power to create wealth,” while at the same time managing the social inequality between whites that wealth engendered. The British social system had not fared so well. In Britain, a wealthy ruling class had shut out white workingmen from political power, which led to class resentment and hatred. Southerners, however, had extended political rights to all white men by basing social divisions on what Hotze believed to be the natural fault lines of race. Hotze called the position “liberal conservatism,” and he believed it would redeem the world.

Despite Hotze’s high-profile efforts, “liberal conservatism” did not work any better than had “King Cotton Diplomacy” in persuading the British to join the war. Though Hotze published his paper into April 1865 and beyond, Britain never officially recognized the Confederacy as an independent nation.

Hotze’s efforts did, however, effectively elucidate the principles of Confederate nationalism by linking the achievement of self-determination with the practices of racial subordination and slavery — principles that, in various forms, continued to shape nation-building efforts well into the 20th century, as segregation, imperialism and the tragic history of the First and Second World Wars amply demonstrated.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.